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redletterdave (2493036) writes "When my best friend upgraded from an iPhone 4S to a Galaxy S4, I texted her hello. Unfortunately, she didn't get that text, nor any of the five I sent in the following three days. My iPhone didn't realize she was now an Android user and sent all my texts via iMessage. It wasn't until she called me about going to brunch that I realized she wasn't getting my text messages. What I thought was just a minor bug is actually a much larger problem. One that, apparently, Apple has no idea how to fix. Apple said the company is aware of the situation, but it's not sure how to solve it. One Apple support person said: 'This is a problem a lot of people are facing. The engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it. There are no reliable solutions right now — for some people the standard fixes work immediately; many others are in my boat.'"

Yes here it is, http://support.apple.com/kb/TS... [apple.com], basically deactivate iMessage (as long as you have a iphone) and of course a list of things that don't work. As well as of course contacting Apple Support which is free 'er' as long as "Most Apple products come with 90 days of complimentary phone support and a one-year limited warranty. We recommend that you check your coverage before contacting us." otherwise you have to pay for it sucka, mwah ha ha. So yeah, basically a big ole bag of dicks move by Apple. What should happen, the crap arse iMessage service should be able to recognised when the recipient has not has not received the message and notify the sender accordingly with the option of sending an SMS, not target the ex user with bill from Apple 'EX'-Customer Support.

The email Verizon sends an Android upgrader includes a link labeled "Prepare and Activate". The page clearly explains how to deal with this. This ENTIRE ARTICLE is about somebody who didn't RTFM and got bit in the butt.

My experience is that if an iPhone is unable to send an iMessage (shows as blue), it automatically falls back to text message after 5 minutes (shows as green). After a few of these in a row, it defaults to text message until the iMessage connection can be re-established with the other endpoint.
(Of course, this option can be turned off if you prefer to use only iMessages, at which point it's not going to be allowed it to fall back.)

For 99% of cases, that's exactly what happens. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug where in some cases that doesn't happen, and iMessage continues to try routing the SMS to the old iDevice, even though it's no longer valid. The bug was actually reported here back in February [slashdot.org] (making this story a dupe).

I can't show you any evidence either but my experience after being given a loan iPhone by my carrier in exchange for my galaxy s3 was that my iPhone owning friends could not message me and it did not fallback sms, this did not correct itself even after many days, by then I had no confidence that the issue would correct itself. Most of the suggested solutions around the net did nothing. The only way I could fix it was to borrow another IPhone, link iMessage to my phone number and then turn it off. It was no

Apparently Apple knows less about their own products than I do as an Apple developer. You can't trust a random support employee to know how iMessage works, it's a complicated system.

It's very simple. If you send an SMS to a number registered as being an iPhone, it will be encrypted for that phone and sent over the internet. If the phone does not decrypt the message and send an acknowledgment within a few minutes, it will be sent as an SMS instead. Repeated delivery failures (2 or 3?) will automatically disable iMessage.

According to the article, the iMessage is sent and status immediately changes to "delivered". That means he has at least one device registered to receive iMessages at that phone number and it is turned on and received the message. His claim to have logged out of iMessage on all his devices is bullshit. He forgot one.

Just not true, or at least it wasn't a few months ago. My daughter switched to Android and I couldn't text her until she finally remembered her Apple ID and we could log into their servers and disable her account. We used the Samsung page for guidance, and it worked just fine. But by itself, my phone kept silently failing to send her messages.

This is not "new" and should not be a top story. Here [apple.com] is a forum post started June 13, 2013 regarding this same issue. That same article discusses pretty much everything I have seen here, and gives the same fixes. Vodafone has a video posted from August 8th 2013 for how to fix the most common causes of this problem which can be found here [youtube.com].

Slashdot has had discussion on this same topic, and nope I am not going to google that for people too.

If you have any other iDevices or OS X with "Messages", they _will_ be delivered.

You don't need a device you just need an iMessage account and the messages will be delivered there. I send iMessages to friends with wifi ipads or ipods and even if they are switched off or not connected to the internet the message gets delivered and is then picked up from iMessage when they get access.

Single person has annoying but minor problem texting random social contact, assumes huge conspiracy and general incompetenceÃÂ¦

Yeah, its a well known and widespread problem. Sending and receiving after switching away from an iphone.

Everyone I know who has an iphone and switched to an android has encountered it, along with related issues resulting from travelling with an iphone and disabling data temporarily, and so on. Sometimes the incantations apple prescribes to fix it work, sometimes the carrier has to do something to get it working again, and some just refuse to work no matter what they do.

TFA links to a Gizmodo story written by Adam Pash, who used to edit LifeHacker and is a prominent Apple fan. There is also this [apple.com] rather long thread on Apple's forums about it. I don't know why you think it contains "no links to substantiate the issue", it clearly does.

It doesn't fall back to SMS because the message is "delivered", you just don't get it. It seems to be related to Apple thinking you still have a device capable of receiving iMessages somewhere. Sometimes if people change their phone but still h

I have a number of friends who are cellphone salespeople and they're ALWAYS told to push Android phones (and afaik there are no incentives or commissions to push iPhones). iPhones are expensive to carriers, both in what Apple charges the carrier initially and in the long term hit to the network (iPhone users use more data). That's not to say they aren't happy to sell you an iPhone (especially if you're switching from a cheap dumbphone plan), but they are much, much happier to see you switch away from an iPh

No, it's actually nothing like that. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I can only assume you're imagining this happening in an Apple store. But it's not. Because Apple doesn't sell Android devices. It's happening at non-denominational cell phone stores and resellers.

So I have to borrow someone's Apple device and make a change because Apple is unwilling/unable to offer... say a web based portal to manage this? Or simply not deliver messages to no longer existing devices?

Wow... I'm rather glad I've never owned an iPhone, I'd hate to live in that sort of world of forced buy in that exists even after you leave it.

it's similar to the far more annoying issue in the google play store where you can't control you region and sometimes gets region locked to a region you are no longer in. So when I bought my phone and went abroad for a trip, the play store bound itself to that country and when I came back refused to unbind, even going as far to wipe the phone, wipe all address and credit card info in google wallet, and reconnect.

Instead it took a week of back and forth with google help for them to just change a setting in the background that force bound my phone to the country I wanted. Of course, now that I have moved to a different country, I have another host of issues I'll have to go through this again.

Both systems have idiotic limitations, for no good reason (and no, limiting which store I bind myself to based on copyright restrictions on a limited portion of the store is foolish, that should be at the app level with a quick IP address location check).

Oddly, this is one of the best parts of the apple store. I can freely rebind myself to any store I want, regardless of my current IP. I just need a method of payment valid for that country and have no balance in my account.

Going to https://supportprofile.apple.c... [apple.com] and making sure my old phone was removed was what eventually fixed this for me. Just putting the SIM back in and turning off iMessage did not fix it.

It was a while ago, so it's possible this might not be the exact right location; but, I do know that it was "removing registered devices" that I did. This seems right.

IIRC this is actually an issue with the sending devices not being aware that the target contact no longer has iMessage enabled.

It's trickier than it seems because iMessage will route to your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It doesn't know if you just haven't signed in recently or if you're gone forever. If I read a message on my Mac, it is a successful delivery, even if I tossed my iPhone in a lake and swore off cell phones forever.

Apple should add a portal to manage this on icloud.com so you can see all your devices and enable/disable them from iMessage. Then the iMessage servers should reply when a device certificate is used that is disabled or deleted, causing the sending device to update its records.

Remember - Apple acts as a key exchange system but the actual private keys only exist on individual devices; the sending device re-encrypts the message for each recipient.

That would work if someone has a iPhone and switch to an Android phone without any other devices as a possible iMessage receiver.

User S, the sender has an iPhone.User R, the receiver had an iPhone but now has an Android phone. He also has an iMac.

S goes into his iMessage on his iPhone and wants to send R a message. The iMessage app goes out to Apple's servers with R's phone number and gets a reply back saying the iMessage path is preferred. The message goes out over iMessage and receipt is acknowledged (by

It does that if and only if there are no other iMessage-enabled devices that can read it. One of the things that I enjoy about the feature is that I can use Messages on my laptop if I'm working, and my phone doesn't go bananas either reporting that it got texts or expecting me to deal with a sea of notifications - they're there in the history, but even if my phone is turned off or not on a network (happens a lot on planes that charge per-device for wifi) I can text to/from my laptop and nobody knows any different.

Figuring out when someone's phone is gone "for good" is a remarkably easy social problem but a very difficult technical one. Making it even easier than it is today for someone to Apple when their phone is gone is the solution, not some terribly complicated heuristics. Of course, that still requires someone to do something, which they'll complain about - but such is life.

No it doesn't - the person sending you a text has to manually resend it as SMS.

I would expect it to remember the last successful option and use that, but it doesn't - it tries using iMessage again after it fails. Someone in another comment mentioned it may remember after "a few" failed attempts, but we never tried that many times - ended up just switching back to another Apple phone. This is the intended reaction in my opinion, I can't see any other reason why they would silently hijack your texts without

This situation smells of BS. By default it routes to SMS when iMessage fails to send to a phone.

Actually this sounds exactly like a typical Apple problem. There was a time that was not that long ago when you couldn't use anything apple with anything else. It was a totally closed ecosystem. That was completely intentional. They changed, a bit, to get back into the market... and have done well because of that. But they're still pretty much the most closed down, locked in ecosystem there is. I've always found it strange how open source people could support Apple at all. They're the most anti-choice softw

Time to copy all high moderated posts from the older article. Actually, there is no need: given that the purpose of posting this article is to bring the echo chamber rambling that this is why apple suck, simply posting "that's why I don't have an iPhone" is enough for +5 insightful.

My wife broke her iPhone so she switched back to her old non-iPhone until we could afford a new one. I kept seeing similar issues where my iPhone would insist using iMessage for her number and would hang trying to send a text. Solution was to tap and hold on the message, after hitting send, and select send as text message. It would keep sending as a text for a while but I'd have to eventually "remind" it when it would forget.

What _IS_ fucking stupid is Google utterly ruined the SMS application for shitty hangouts _AND_ they still haven't cloned / stolen the functionality of iMessage properly. For goodness sakes, just copy Apple already. The Apple solution is how it should work, attempt IP based message, if it fails revert to SMS//__and make it fucking seamless to the end user__//

Hangouts is an abortion, honestly as someone who switch to Android 3 years ago now, I'm really getting tired of Google focusing on un-important shit and worrying about uglifying things than improving stuff.

Because most telcos will quite happily let you email a massive file or carry on a one hour long low-latency roaming voice conversation for less money than they charge to send a few bytes "sometime in the next few seconds," that's why. Also, there's no reliable inexpensive gateway for non-cellular devices to tie into SMSs as there is for both voice calls and massive emails, even though it would be far easier to create one.

Guess it depends where you are. Here, I haven't had anything other than effectively unlimited-texts plan for years, even on very cheap feature phone plans. In fact I think even some of our old payg sims have an unlimited texts option if we top up enough each month (don't know - they are only now in kids' / emergency spare phones).Minutes and data, on the other hand, are always limited (at easy to hit limits) unless you pay a lot more.

_if we top up enough each month_. Yes, but if you don't, you pay per text.

Hmm, I can't find the REALLY cheap virginmobile plans at the moment, maybe they don't exist anymore (up until a few years ago when I had one, it was $5/month if you had it auto-top-up every 3 months).. But even now, the lowest $20/month top up plan I see mentions 15 cents/text. While that's really expensive, for someone who just uses it as an emergency phone, it's not really a big deal.

I'm amazed Americans still pay for them. In most other countries any sort of contract comes with a few thousand free SMS per month. I pay about $15 for 5000 texts, 300 minutes and "unlimited" data. Includes 4G.

Is this 2002? All the plans by all the companies include unlimited texts, including low-end $30/month plans. I only know one person who pays to text (after reaching a certain amount), this person has stuck with his same phone contract for more than 10 years.

When I was on the way to the airport to pick up my 65 year old father today, he texted me from his iPhone to say they had landed.

My mother and her Blackberry are the same.

Just because you may not text does not mean that there aren't plenty of people who do not have enough of an understanding to use alternative services and simply stick with what comes for 'free' and already on the device.

As of Kitkat, at least on the Nexus 5, hangout is the default SMS application and does this if you're not careful. It can try to start the conversation via a hangout if the contact has a gmail account, which is kind of useless if they don't have an android phone and you want to use SMS as most people do - to contact them *right now* on their phone.

You have to remember to select their phone number specifically, then it will send an SMS. It will also always reply in kind - get a text it will always reply by t

i like that iMessage works across devices, including not just ipad but macs. macs can recieve imessages at any time, not just when an ichat window is open. so it's finally a viable messaging system that is baked into the OS. from my computer I can send messages to any iphone or any other mac. it's actually really powerful.

whereas developing a standard application is too complex (but now easier than setting up and maintaining a web app).

You can make one web application, or you can make 14 native applications: one each for Windows, Windows RT, OS X, X11/Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U, 3DS, PlayStation Vita, PS3, and PS4. By the time you've finished negotiating with the console makers just to become an authorized developer, you could have finished the web app.

The default texting app in Android gives you group messaging too. Free replacement text messaging apps like Handcent give you group messaging and Reply All. That isn't really a feature worth going to a propritary protocol for.

Getting texts on multiple devices (computer especially) is certainly a worthwhile feature. The end-run around ridiculous text fees for those without unlimited plans is also fantastic. I just wish it was more open. I'd like to see an Android and a Windows iMessage client. Making those available would make iMessage more useful, even for Apple's own customers.

What would be a better solution is Apple making it cross platform. This way, no matter what platform one is on, iMessages go through. This would establish iMessage as a standard, and that would be better for Apple on the long term, than only allowing their devices to use it.

What would be a better solution is Apple making it cross platform. This way, no matter what platform one is on, iMessages go through

What, and lose the locking. I know several families right now that are stuck on ios because someone in the the family (usually a child or senior parent) uses an ipod touch or ipad that -can't- fall back to SMS; and it often crosses households (grandparents / grandchildren living somewhere else etc... so now the entire family is stuck on ios...)

What an idiotic statement. There's a very easy solution. If user has not been available on iMessage for more than reasonable amount of time, no more than a day, fall back to SMS.

Stupidly easy solution.

That's how it works. The "reasonable amount of time" is 5 minutes. And any message sent within those 5 minutes will automatically be re-sent as an SMS (which unfortunately means the recipient will receive the message twice... once the iMessage finally arrives).

And there can't be any bugs, because in order to acknowledge receipt of a message you have to decrypt the message, and the decryption keys cannot be copied off the device the message is being sent to. Part of it is stored in a dedicated corner of sili

Here is how to fix it: tell your iPhone to send texts to your non iPhone friend via SMS. Bam, done. Delete the contact and re add it or ask Siri to do it for you or whatever, this isn't a big deal at all.

so you think this is a reasonable user experience? first off knowing which of your contacts use imessage, and then contacting all them and tell them to screw with their phone settings?

And if you have an iPhone and no other Apple devices? Well, when it can no longer contact that device (or hell, assume all four of your iDevices fall off-deck while you're on a cruise), what should it do, then?

Sent from a MacBook Pro using Avatron Air Display on an iPad Air as a secondary display.